This Week Was Absurd | Ep. 079 Lemonade Stand 🍋

I'm Ida Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Jennifer Garner. We talk all about what it means to be a good friend, Jen's encyclopedic knowledge of my recipes, and the Paris tour I put together for Jen and her daughter. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers. Hey, Sue Bird here. This week on Bird's Eye View, I catch up with 2026 WNBA champion and finals MVP Gabby Williams after a whirlwind of a week. Gabby talks about her mindset going into game seven, how it felt facing an equally defensive-minded team in the Atlanta Dream, and why Golden State's system can't be the same. Plus, a special guest hops on the pod to surprise Gabby. You gotta check it out. So check out this week's Bird's Eye View on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. We got a great show for you tonight. We got, what's her name? Uh, Adriana. No, no, no. Uh, the person who sings the, she's a singer. She's in wicked. We've got Ariana Grande playing for you tonight. We've got, you know, we've got, uh, what's his name? The guy who plays the banjo. Steve Martin's coming on. It's going to be a great show. Talk about his new movie. And Questlove. And The Rock will be here. Let's cut all of this intro. This sucks. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Atlanta Dream Stand. We have actual news to deliver to you today through your ear holes. And, uh, I believe we should start by looking back at something from last week. The great northern state of Alaska. Yes. You see, last week we discussed, uh, a incredibly intense race between the United States and the United States. And we're going to talk about the race between Dan Sullivan and Dan Sullivan in the Alaska senatorial election. Yes. I remember that. I want to give you a little update, actually not on that election, which by the way, the Dan Sullivan, the fake one is on the ballot still, uh, versus Mary Peltola. Um, but Alaska has only 750,000 people. And that is just basically enough to have a single seat in the house of representatives. So on top of their two Senator positions, they are also doing an election for their single house of representative rep. And just like the other one, basically anybody can run in this open primary and then the top four move on to the general election. So right now, top four, it is Republican incumbent, Nick Begich. Okay. A, the independent candidate, Bill Hill, who's a fisherman and a teacher. And in third place, we got Eric Hefner, who's a Democrat. Okay. But what's interesting is that Eric Hefner is currently in federal prison in New York until 2036. In 2022, he was sentenced. Is there a fourth place? 20 years. There is somebody went behind him. He's beating somebody. He's in third place currently in federal prison. Yeah. So he's threatened to kill police officers. Judges made bomb threats and did harassment campaigns and tried to blackmail them for money to get them to stop. Um, so this is just, I thought an interesting aspect where you can go vote for this person in Alaska, actually coming in this upcoming general election. Uh, the U S constitution requires candidates to live in the state that they will represent at the time of the election. Okay. So this shouldn't work on paper, but to count, to counter this, he registered like his information for the election using his mom's address who lives in South Dakota quote from the AP, neither has any apparent ties to Alaska. And so I was like, what the hell? I'm sorry. He's never visited Alaska. According to Alaska news source.com, neither him nor his mom have quote ever set foot in the state. From his mom, Carol Hafner. I've flown over it as far as boots on the ground. That's in my future. Now you might wonder why it's in her future. It turns out she's running for Senate. She lives in South Dakota and also ran successfully for Senate in Alaska successfully. I mean, they didn't kick her off the ballot. She did not advance to the top. Let her run. Yeah. Let her, I mean, it's against the constitution, but let her run. And she's never been there. And yeah, call me crazy. If you're in jail, you should still be able to run. You think so? Yeah. I think it doesn't inherently in a weird way. It doesn't inherently disqualify you. I think it's just like, you're very unlikely to win. You want to be in an Alaskan jail at least. So he he's in prison. If I'm being picky, I think the craziest thing about this to me is that it's not an Alaskan jail. Yeah. Cause he could, he could rule it like Kingpin. Cause he has to serve his time. Even if he wins. Yeah. Yeah. So they have to come to the jail. Exactly. Cause to be clear, he's in prison for another 10 years. It would be the entire term if he were to be elected. Yeah. I mean, again, if it was, if it were an Alaskan jail, no problems with it and the people and the people voted for him again, he would have to be voted for. You know what? Yeah. Our representatives go live in DC. They don't even live in the state that they're representing. It doesn't matter if he's in a criminal one. We have, you know, so right folks. Uh, I gotta say her, our response to have you ever step foot in Alaska is that's a generational, not so much boots on the ground per se. I've flown over it. That part's coming in the future. I think that's very, I like how she's confident. She's going to, that's a great response. She didn't advance to the top four that that's for the two Dan Sullivan's and Mary Peltola, but Eric, the guy who's in jail, he did finish top four. He got 6,000 votes. You can see him in the election. Like if you go to elections.alaska.gov, he's right there. Uh, and legally, it seems like it'll be allowed because, quote, the Alaska Supreme court determined that Hafner could run for office, but cannot take office. So he can't, so he can run, but if they elect him, he can't become the house of rap. What the hell is it? What is the Supreme court doing? That's fair. No, it doesn't make any sense. It's a waste of everyone's time. What's going on in Alaska? We have three Dan Sullivan criminal. Actually, the next time people listening to this go out to vote, because I think I really had this realization this year, uh, when we were voting in the primaries and we were going through the huge list of people running for governor. And there are some extraordinary characters running for these positions on state ballots. And obviously a lot of them are not running with like any expectation to win, but they have like crazy campaigns. They have like crazy campaigns. Insane websites, insane names that they've changed themselves to like, just, just flip through your, your book. Next time you go, uh, go vote. If you get that, like a similar booklet to California that gives you all the names and, uh, just go to the, go to the bottom of the list. You'll find some interesting people. I mean, that's probably why he got, cause he's the democratic representative, right? He's the leading one. You don't like get picked as he is a Democrat. Let's put it that way. There's no other Democrat running as you, or at least, uh, they're not in the top four. Although I don't know. Uh, what, who McDermott is, uh, representing us, but technically look, if, if, you know, if the Democrats want to flip the seat, they need Eric Hafner to win. So, you know, this could, in theory, there could be a big movement from the democratic establishment to get him. I'd rather not. Can you imagine? He goes like, he goes like really pro-Israel and APAC just $60 million. They dumped 60 million into the campaign. And they, this is pretty goofy, but it's all real. However, let's go over to Texas. A little bit goofy. Uh, this is just, I think we're just going to open this episode with some follow-ups to last week. Cause we had a lot to cover, uh, in Texas, as we know, the, uh, the James Tyler, go Ken Paxton, blue, Texas, possible big, uh, Senator waste is coming up. But as part of a, you know, we talked about last week, how Republicans are down on the polls and they're down on the betting markets. And so there's trying to turn it around. Donald Trump came up with an idea and his idea is to bring back something that hasn't been done since the 1970s. And even then it was only like once or twice by the Democrats, never been done by Republicans and it's a midterm convention. So, uh, they're having a gigantic Republican midterm convention in Texas. Now, normally these conventions exist for a couple of purposes, which is like to, uh, officially set an agenda or whatever, but all that stuff's already been done. So really this only exists as like a drumming up support type beat where Trump is going to go out, give a speech. They're spending $40 million on this. So it's a pretty big chunk of campaign cash. And, uh, the idea I believe as, as been expressed is that he wants to get his base that normally only votes for Trump to get out there and vote for Republicans in the midterm. That's the idea. So this, again, this is not a normal thing. It's not like this happens every year. This is, he invented this idea and a lot of people are, you know, they're not going to vote for Trump. They're going to vote for Trump. is what the noise coming out is that Republican senators are frustrated having to go. Like they have to fly out to Texas, to be at this thing. And, you know, as we may have mentioned last week, some of them are trying to kind of distance themselves or say they're more independent. So there's some that are dropping out and trying to find excuses as to why not go and making up illnesses or whatever. And then others are, you know, grudgingly going. The speakers are going to be a who's who. It's Trump, then it's Vance, then it's RFK, then it's Scott Besant. And the idea, I think, maybe Todd Blanche is doing one more. The idea is a like reminder to America, this is all we've accomplished. This is how we're planning going forward. And you need to vote Republican in midterms or it's all going to go to shit. That is the big three messages. And this happens like by the time you see this episode, we're recording the day before, but it starts then. Trump will have probably given a speech by the time you see this. And I'm sure it'll be a legendary one. But I thought it's worth mentioning because there's been, I think the broader story here is, so all of the fundraising by Republicans, not all of it, but the vast majority has gone to the MAGA tour pack or the MAGA. MAGA Inc. And that is where the money is. And Trump controls the strings on that. So he has all of the Republican cash and all of the Senate races and House races have been begging him to start deploying some of that cash. And his big idea is to take $40 million and do this big. This is how it's, so there's like some questions as to whether or not this is effective. And it remains to be seen. Maybe getting out his base is what they need. I mean, I imagine the execution of the convention is different than his, his campaign rallies. But I do think this is being done with the backdrop of Trump will try to put together these big events, like things that go on in Washington, fill out this park, we're throwing some sort of parade, we're trying to do some sort of rally again. And compared to when he was campaigning in the past, his ability to fuel physical turnout at these things seems to have really fallen off. I wonder if it applies to something like this, where like just getting normal people to attend and rally and get excited to vote. If he has that same capacity to do it anymore, even with that amount of money and other politicians being present. Yeah, I think it'll be a big bellwether tomorrow to see what happens. I show this quote on my clip, but he did, he's been going around saying, please, please, please, please pretend, pretend that I'm on the ballot. Just come out and vote for Trump. Pretend my name's on the ballot. So that, that is the goal. Of this, that's a direct quote. That's what he said. So that's the 40 million, 10 million more was unlocked. I want to mention this, the race, the Paxton, Tallarico race in Texas is probably, I don't know, it's tough to say, but it may be the most important of all the senatorial races. It's the one that'll decide whether or not this is a true flip or not. Cause I think they kind of need it. The Democrats kind of need it. And it is looking, I did look into it more today. Man, the math is so bad for him. All Republican standard ballot, like all, I'm sorry, all Republican standard ballot. All standard ballots in Texas, him meaning bad for, I'm sorry, bad for Tallarico. Sorry. I'm bad to Tallarico. Okay. It's bad for Tallarico. It's in like the standard ballot in Texas is Republican plus seven or something. It's like just by default. So there's going to be people that have to go down the list and vote Republican on most things that they vote on. And then on Paxton switch. And he is such a bad candidate that some people will do that. He is pulling under Greg Abbott, the Republican governor. He's pulling under like, I don't know, Ted Cruz when he was like, he's pulling under, but he's not, it's just close. Like people have, that's a hard thing for people to do in America. It's like, RRR, it's just weird. So I actually don't know. I don't know how this will go, but he, the energy enthusiasm we mentioned last week is all a hundred percent on Tallarico side. And so anyway, $10 million. So that's what I want to say is, is this is their first spend. So this is the big war chest. They finally realized this is an important one. This is probably the one they need to hold. And they have the best advantage in. And this is outside the spending related to the convention, but the convention is happening in Texas. It's happening in Texas. And again, I guess they're just focusing everything towards Texas as the main baseline of like, we make our stand here. Okay. So there's 40 million on the convention and then 10 million on ad buys, which are going to call Tallarico. Tallarico pedophile or something like that. Whatever that's, that's, that's, that's the thing. And if that moves the needle, then this race is probably cooked. It's like, I would be honest. Like it's one's, this one's the closest. One, it seems like as unpopular as he is and Paxton being as bad as he is, it's still such a uphill battle for this race. Maybe blue Texas in the future with 24. Yeah. I just like, can't let my hopes get up. I, again, I feel like this is the narrative. My entire life is like Texas, Texas gets more purple every year. Yeah. More purple every year. Yeah. And then it's just, and it's right every time. Yeah. It's not to say that it can't happen. I think it's really important to get out there. Uh, cause it's like you always say, Aiden, don't bother. It's not going to change anyways. I have sold just a message on never trying. Haven't I? It just feels bad to fail and you don't learn anything anyway by trying. Yeah. Wait, so help me understand this. So the MAGA coalition or maybe the explicit like organization is raising more money than the Republican. Way more. Okay. The, the, the small donor base of the Republican party gives it all to this MAGA pack. Okay. And that is where the money, and they have a $400 million war chest, which is pretty big and that's what they're ready to spend on elections and whatever, but they haven't deployed any of them. And there's been begging to deploy it. Help me understand how many quiet Leonard's is that? Well, it depends on the books or off the books, off books. Oh, we don't even know the extent of how much. I will round this out by saying in all seriousness, if you do care about this race and you do. You care about Tallarico winning, you please show up and go vote in Texas. There are still months, uh, leading up to election day right now. And you have time to turn the tide. Don't get complacent. And if you, and if you like Paxton, it's let's you've been a day one. Let's put them in like a class for charisma or something for our gigantic Paxton loving audience. Get out there and do your democratic. Come on lemonade state. We'll teach you the intangibles. Uh, that's three and John packs, it would be a fucking funny episode. Dude, that's kind of a banger. We all, we all just kind of sit and like twiddle our thumbs. Let's bring back a previous guest. Like it'll be like markup debate. Markiplier versus Paxton, like just our real out of left field. Uh, um, I didn't want to say there was one ad, uh, I saw this earlier today. I'll make sure I get this. Correct. So there was a person who was a staffer on Ken Paxton's team formerly who is now appearing in a semi-viral ad in Texas to counter this $10 million spend where he says, I worked for Ken Paxton for years. He should not be your Senator. He, I mean, uh, so that that's going on right now. Um, because although Paxton was acquitted of the crime he's accused of, this guy believes he is guilty of it and that he is one of the accusers. This is, this is like this spent when Spencer Pratt, my friend just total coincidence had worked for Spencer Pratt for a few years on and off, like before he was running for mayor and we were talking about it and he was just like, I worked for that guy. He should not be the mayor. He is, he is not a responsible person. Uh, okay. Well, why don't we skate on over to, this is a super tiny piece of news, but I thought it was a kind of a silly, interesting Uber. service in Nigeria and Uganda. And because they are doing this, they are only, uh, keeping service in four remaining African countries. They have a really limited spread of operations on the continent in general. And the main reasons that they were citing are there have been like continuous disputes with drivers around fares in the country because of rising fuel costs, drivers basically saying they aren't getting paid enough, and also disputes around discounts or fare programs that Uber has run in the country before. And I saw this story, and then I imagined this clip was circulating around the same time for the same reason, which is a clip of trevor noah a south african comedian uh that is explaining the story of how uber drivers in nigeria uh took advantage of uber's strategy of how they approach like new countries right so you guys are pretty familiar with the general idea of like uber launches somewhere the fares are really cheap yeah and uh they give the majority of the fare to the drivers because they need to encourage people to start driving for the platform and they need to encourage people to start using it. And that was like the golden age of Uber for everybody, right? From the user perspective, it was fucking amazing. But eventually, because the company has to start making money, they kind of rug pull the, I don't even know if you could call it a rug pull because it's like a slow bleed over time, is they start taking more and more of the fare. The shitification type thing, yeah. People feel like it's worse, yeah. And it gets worse for both the drivers and the users. And this experience is pretty universal, I would say. This is my new go-to conversation topic with Uber drivers right now is just asking them how it's changed over time if they've worked for Uber for a long time. And in Nigeria, Trevor Noah is explaining that when Uber had initially, announced that they were launching in the country one of the uh programs to get drivers to sign up for the app was if you drove people back and forth to the airport you could get a special bonus on your fare and this was a benefit to encourage drivers to get on the platform so what a bunch of nigerian drivers started doing at the time was they would take two phones with two uber accounts call for go to the airport call for a ride with their own phone because like the fares were low confirm the ride drive away from the airport get the rebate and repeat that and live off the rebates and i don't know if this was happening in uganda but there's this general idea that over time uber had dealt with like so many issues with uh like drivers basically taking advantage or combating them or uh that they have given up on service in nigeria altogether and i think the idea of drivers like just taking two phones and driving themselves around all day is like really wait i remember someone doing this in the early days of um what's the uber eats door dash and uber eats yeah and there was restaurants because they wanted to get restaurants to sign up so they would give them these incredible you could up charge or whatever and they would give you all the cut yeah and so i remember one guy had his own pizza place and he sold like 5 000 pizzas to himself and he had to take a photo for whatever it was just empty boxes but he stacked them up and took a photo and then got and it's just like these weird little niches in the in the investor cash at least be forced to eat the pizzas yes he's on camera while the ceo watches it's like i feel like it's those like random like in the older days of the internet when there was like less id security around things you could maybe you could sign up for a platform and get like a five dollar bonus in your account or something like that yeah and then you made a bunch of accounts with like proton mails oh yeah yeah yeah it's fun i i uh do you guys this kind of reminds me of when you remember movie pass yeah how they would movie pass that's the goat that's the gold standard of like we're just gonna burn money on things yeah but i don't know if you guys know that but i don't know if you guys know what took them down was mission impossible 3 was such a popular movie that everyone went to see it and use movie pass and they literally could not afford to buy the tickets at a loss anymore and that's what killed the company like they were kind of keeping it going but tom cruise's movie had such a big opening the business only worked if movies were kind of bad people were kind of bad it's so funny they couldn't see too many movies it's kind of a glorious couple years i'm thinking about all my smash gg co-workers that had movie pass living in san francisco like uber was still cheap movie pass existed yeah all these like vc funded startup ideas that just had no long-term legs at least to like actually become profitable but you existed in this like glory time of them being cheap and accessible they call it the millennial one month boot camp and get a hundred thousand dollars at those companies literally i know people and dude and as far as i understand they're not great engineers yeah like they're they're like fine and a millennial vc subsidy from like 2012 to 2016 or that was a really glorious uh anyway okay uber uber shuts off service in these couple places but i want to know about all these videos in austin right now because i've been seeing like way way more videos of cyber cabs flying around uh austin texas and presumably other places back in texas nope just texas okay cyber cab from tesla has launched we've talked a bunch about robo taxis and we've talked a bunch about the first episode there's a very first or second i think second oh yeah um and i think we can now officially say i won the debate cyber cab is here here is a video plucked off of youtube um there are a number of these videos of people taking cyber cabs so these have launched and what this is is different from the traditional tesla that you go by as a consumer which now has that sort of like self-driving feature this is a car custom made to not have a steering wheel there is no driver there are two seats at the moment and then you kind of sit there in front of the car and you have this little like tv ipad type thing and it has it has launched it's out and so this uh happened last uh oh god the other videos of oh there's a lot of funny memes about this but yes last week on september 3rd this launch it is limited in austin texas uh as far as i can tell it's maybe like hard to get or only influencers the information in typical tesla fashion is hard to get and understand but perry if you can pull up my thing my mystery my my favorite sort of uh recap of the video is that it's a car that's been launched in austin texas and it's been launched in the weekend and how it went overall is from this website basenor this is from basenor and the headline recapping the weekend was cyber cab completes launch weekend with no fatalities let's go so we freaking did it um one thing i thought was particularly crazy here uh and this is within i'm not really sure who the publication is but they talk about how with the cyber cab there is no ability for a remote driver to like take control of it so oh wow unlike the other ones that are out there it's like whatever happens happens you can't come take this over yeah so um it seems like it's going fine of the couple videos i saw people you know like it's mostly very pro tesla influencers basically is who's using this stuff yeah because they had an event recently right where they invited tesla specific influencers to be a part of the showcase or something i mean it's kind of how they launched their robo taxis so the first stage of this which we talked about was they had cars that were driving around austin but with a safety truck and now this is their like this is a model that is fully meant for robo taxis um but it's kind of they're pushing it farther it seems like than other cars where like waymo you can still remote control one of these things is there any explanation for the lack of that control because i you know ideally the product like works fine without it i think the idea in my mind of oh this security measure for like a waymo exists is good but yeah because there's still a lot of problems with these these cars are not perfect yet i mean they're getting better but they're they're they're not like ready to go most people would would argue yeah so i mean i don't i don't know how they argued this but i will say is it ties to the broader story here and this is from tech crunch which is that they are now immediately tesla being probed by the national highway traffic safety administration for not following the specific safety requirements that you have to have in a car at a federal level so at the texas level the texas state level is like kind of loose on regulation sure but at the federal level there is an organization the nhtsa that basically says hey to be a motor vehicle in america you have to have these certain things like certain brake systems or steering systems or crash protocol you know ideas steps all these different things and the weird thing is that companies to say yeah our car is valid to be on the road they self certify so they just report to the nhtsa yeah we followed everything so tesla did that they're like yep we check out we're following everything and they're like yeah we're following everything and we're following all the rules okay but how could you possibly follow the rules about steering systems when there isn't a steering system obviously this is the airplane rule what what do you mean by that you don't have to follow the steering system rules if you don't have a steering system that's actually what is happening yes that is actually the argument and what a lot of these autonomous vehicle makers have been doing which is saying well that thing doesn't apply to us because we don't even have a human driver it's na it's just a yeah so immediately they opened a probe you can tell that this organization wants to be very pro like robo taxis their their statements are all about that like we fully support the safe development and deployment of automated vehicles but as the federal regulator we need to ensure that our laws are followed so they've kind of said like hey you're clearly not following stuff we need to do an investigation and see what's actually going on and this seems like a pattern where elon's companies kind of just charge forward and then they deal with the regulation impact yeah that's always been his mo afterwards yeah sometimes success sometimes detriment yeah so zooks is another company you might have heard of which is a smaller they're mostly in las vegas right now and they're also a vehicle that is on public roads that has no driver and no steering wheel so that's the other one that is like notable but they had the same problem in 2022 they also were sort of investigated by the nhtsa they had to slow down their development a whole bunch of zooks is sort of behind they're owned by amazon they're like amazon's player you quite possibly have not heard of them they're owned by amazon they're like amazon's player you quite possibly have not heard of them they're owned by amazon they're owned by amazon they're like amazon's player you quite possibly have not heard of them yet but it's interesting right now because like all these companies are yeah here's the zooks they're trying or are launching cars with no steering systems and to be honest it looks fucking cool to like sit in a car where there's no steering wheel there's more space and all that stuff but obviously you have to like make sure shit is safe um so that's where it's at right now cyber cab is actually out and i will and i will end this by giving a doug take which we all value deeply take which is i've said this before i think it is a bummer i think the real value of autonomous vehicles is going to be on the consumer side the average person driving a car having some kind of safety safety system and automated driving because the average person are the idiots who get into car accidents and kill people and do all this horrific damage the average uber driver or taxi driver is incentivized to be very safe so on the safety side the real value is consumer vehicles not replacing ubers and so i think it's a bit of a bummer that like this is the big push from tesla rather than saying hey let's get the tesla vehicle out of the way because that's the one that would like make the biggest impact if your argument is this is going to make humanity safer yeah i i mean i guess that's the the angle is the the monetary incentive right like this is just the path forward to like monetize this project quicker yeah you and get more reps and yeah yeah plus i mean you know you know how like young people nowadays are getting their driver's license later and later it's pretty common yeah uh like if this technology continues to grow at scale yeah oh people don't have consumer vehicles that's like a real that's like a possible future yeah to me the wealthy to me like the the idealistic version like the the end point that's somewhere in the future it's like you live in some sort of city you have some sort of like robust like metro and public transportation system for all the areas and things within the city you have this network of vehicles that are automated or can communicate with each other that like lower the rates of accidents or the fault of drivers you can tell you're in sweden you're able to you're able to rent you know you're able to easily access or rent like some sort of larger one if you like need to move things from a store or something like that the weather is cold and depressing and it's cold and depressing sun has gone down and we all say and we all say hey door when we go by and when we say goodbye to each other yeah it's we all want that that's your dream future paradise i i agree that's that's gonna be awesome in many ways i think the bummer is that if you imagine a let's say 20 year timeline from where we are right now to getting to the point that all vehicles are automated on the road and we've mostly gone away with the enormous amount of death and destruction that happens from human beings driving cars at each other that's the steps to get there it would be cooler if we started by eliminating the average consumer accident rather than the first step being eliminate all the jobs of people who do this work and aren't really causing the accidents anyways i guess it's really hard to incentivize a bunch of people that already have cars to spend a bunch of money on this new vehicle it's extraordinarily hard and it's really hard to incentivize a bunch of people that already have cars to spend a bunch of money on this new vehicle it's extraordinarily hard to incentivize a bunch of people that already it's just a bummer it's funny to think about what the core of that message is in a way like you can package it differently but it's like hey you're a shitty driver and that's why you need our car and that's that's why you need to give me 30 to 60 thousand dollars plus a recurring monthly fee probably and there's a subscription speaking of the millennial subsidy it kind of applies here because i saw that the austin cybercab prices are extraordinarily low bucks well below even waymo who's probably gonna have to drop their prices in response yeah and so we're looking to a few years here probably of you can you can go to the airport back and forth or whatever in your self-driving car because it's like there's a big race uh in in this and llms and all this that they're just they're subsidizing it for you it seems like it's all happening pretty quick to be honest at least maybe it's tbd right because it feels like the regulatory part has always been the slowest thing and that doesn't i don't see it going that maybe it's like a thing where the dam breaks you know somebody gets it and then nobody died we're gonna go maybe i'll listen that we know if there's a feature in the car where it then hides the body scrapes it something so the other part of what i've been talking to uber drivers about lately is this and how they feel about waymo's and automated vehicles come in it's interesting there has been a theme so far across every person i've asked they're like i don't think the cars are good enough i'm not really worried about not being able to do this anytime soon which is interesting to me because i do think they're clearly getting very good like especially in la you have examples flying around everywhere already and i'm not uh so instead of i expected people to be more like worried or maybe even angry that this is happening and potentially threatening their work but they were all every single person i talked to what was with the air of this isn't even going to be a big deal for a while i'm not even stressed about it which which surprised me and this is that you know this is only a sample this is a sample size right it's like five people in the last few weeks that i've talked to right but the fact that all five of them had a similar error to that in la yeah la is the craziest way to do it because we see waymo's all the time yeah i know they're they're like they tailgate a little one guy's and say he was just so insistent he was just like i'll i'll always be a better driver than that thing and i was like yeah that could be true and maybe he's the goat i don't know even if you're the goat driver it's not like when i'm drunk at night going over the bar i'm like let's rank these on who could do the fastest lap or whatever it's i i just i don't know yeah genuinely my criteria is don't kill me get me yeah don't kill me home the driver's name max verstappen times are tough are you tired of hearing about business tech and finance from the bros we are the tiger sisters a top business podcast with the vox media podcast network tiger sisters releases every monday and we decode money power and love and who doesn't love all those things we are the internet's wall street and silicon valley big sisters tune in every monday for late night sister talk meets boardroom strategy check out tiger sisters on youtube spotify or wherever you get your podcasts welcome to the tiger fam i'm bridget reed and i'm james walsh the alexander brothers moved in a world of multi-million dollar homes exclusive parties and powerful people behind that glamorous lifestyle were years of rumors and allegations that they were committing assault in our reporting for new york magazine we investigated what people knew and heard from women who came forward to tell their stories now that reporting is the basis for a new three-part docuseries the wolves of real estate the alexander brothers you'll see exactly how privilege protected them and how they were finally stopped stream all three episodes now only on peacock all right i i have been i'm just overwhelmed by all this stuff i hear about ai could somebody here explain it to me no yeah this has to be collaborative here or let me know what you've heard because i'm i'm teeing up this story because i wanted to bring it up and it ties in what we just said jensen wong my old boss and the ceo of open ai two people greg brockman two people who have no incentive to lie yeah have both said something to the effect of agi is here jensen wong he he literally said agi has arrived yeah it's actually funny because greg brockman sort of was like trying to give himself a little bit of wiggle room he's like uh this model may not exist so the context is that open ai just released their latest model astra it's a leap in performance and uh he said maybe it's not this exact model but we're so close that the era of agi is here and then jensen wong goes no we're we got it we got it bro it's here lock it up get in it's been achieved so if he hasn't no agi artificial general intelligence is the idea of basically a machine that is that is better than humans at all tasks is that the idea or is it like human level performance on any intellectual task i'm i'm not uh i mean that's the criticism of it is there's no solid definition of that term people do not disagree people do not agree about what it actually means so whether or not you've arrived at it is contentious to begin with and then of course you have the financial crisis and then you have the financial crisis and then you have the financial relationship between both of these parties yeah which makes them incredibly incentivized to complement the other in regards to this being achieved especially as open ai prepares for its massive ipo anthropic same thing both have them coming up they're a very big deal there's a lot of financial uh things here but i do want to say as someone who's not an expert the demos and tests and things that have been coming out from astra i don't know about agi doesn't get you out of me but are are spookily impressive and as someone in the melee community i don't know if you saw they finally after a years-long project decompiled uh the full melee code yeah they were at a road block for a really long time with it and astra is what broke the roadblock yeah and i saw an example that really stuck to me is uh so grand theft auto vice city is a game i liked growing up and uh it has horrible mobile it has no mobile port and has horrible pc port and they just i guess fed this game in and they're like oh my god i'm not gonna play this game i'm gonna play this and it made a mobile port and the mobile port would ran wave higher fps and it's like things where i don't know if it's not like if it's not novel breaking new ground i don't know how good it is at that but on things where it's like this is a pain in the ass and would take a lot of time and maybe the code base is all understood it's like doing things that are genuinely i would be incredibly impressed with a human team taking the time to do that so it's like it is valuable in that is a valuable thing like that is rockstar took it down instantly because it's like showing them up but like that i saw it play and i was like that is a smooth mobile port of gta4 that is interesting if i was a dismissive cynical lemonade stand commenter who has no friends i might be typing right now oh my god he says it's so important agi but then he gives two examples that are just fucking video games i can already see that comment by the way i know you are i know i'm talking to the the fucking robot from davis x machina i don't think that but i am starting to see examples of like damn that's a project that i know would take people a lot of time and effort and it is done quickly and that is like i don't know these examples just replied video games kill yourself he just replied video games are an area where i have some like context so i can like know this would take a while i've i've i've downloaded mods i've worked with my i know you've decompiled things yeah i haven't decompiled things but i've worked with a game developer okay uh and i just it is interesting and i i think i you know rucker brag when we talked about him before a guy who is extremely uh in the left-wing space but the one area he diverges on is like hey i think ai is pretty important here it's worth discussing and he's been going crazy about that he's putting me about all the time so i just think i don't think agi is here it seems a bit of a marketing hype but i sometimes think people go oh marketing hype well let's dismiss it out of hand and there's nothing to even look at here and when i look at what's happening with astra it's like damn i'm seeing performance leaps again i'm seeing performance leaps again i'm seeing performance leaps again things this is better at things than it was before and so uh especially especially this is something i do know about because i've seen the process i even when i made the game i fucking funded the game but worked on it he made me uh design a level in blender and uh make a model like i had to go through the process we made videos about that and so i've seen how that how fucking painful that process is and there is some insane examples of someone feeding an image into it and it generates a full blender model and it generates a full blender model and it generates a in 3d that can be used it is that is a that is a time saver at the very least look i have to call these out when i see them because i still think there is a theory among some people that this is crypto where it's just fucking useless years on yeah this is useful for all people like this is going to do something um i actually have a great story about the practical application of ai in somebody's work okay i'm saving for the patreon that a viewer shared with me we call this week it's amazing sure well i'll give you a practical application right now my wife designs cosplay props professionally and people commission her to create cosplay props and she created a light up sword she has no coding experience really and um she was able to get it with a raspberry pi to set up the light show thing for the sword and she programmed it through the through quad and it just did the work for her that i'm just seeing these real world examples of like shit getting done and it makes me think i have to update my priors here and constantly uh mentioned to people i i like i think it's being ignorant not to there's something happening so i still doesn't change much on my thoughts on um the financial reality of these uh ipos i can talk about the anthropic one which is coming up two trillion there's a lot i want to say about it i don't know if we want to go into it but whatever two trillion yeah i could you give some thoughts about that the one thought i want to give is they are being real everybody is trying to figure out what to do with the amount of revenue that they're creating so they can justify the valuation and anthropic is doing something really sneaky with their revenue which is that they are it's like if you're best buy and i am a video game manufacturer okay and i sell you a copy of my game give me a game mario final fantasy final fantasy okay and it retails for 60 bucks and i sell it to you for 30 or 40 and then you sell it for 60 and collect the upside they are this is what this is what like um anthropic does through model providers like microsoft or whatever they have these middlemen uh they are taking the final listing price the middleman sells it for recording that as their revenue and then recording the cut that they get as an outside expense that doesn't get recorded in ebita right here so it makes it seem way fucking bigger it's like the end result if you go down to the fine print is correct but the way they're recording it is not the normal accounting practice so it makes the end result of the fine print is correct but the way they're recording it is not the normal accounting practice so it makes them seem like their revenue is is much much bigger and growing much much faster than it probably is and i they are a fast-growing company again it's tough because there's there's shades of truth but everybody is incentivized to be um a little fucky with it and additionally so you guys watch big short together there's a big scene where the woman with the blind glasses on is talking about she's the ratings agency there is a massive push right now from anthropic open ai and honestly nvidia even though they're fine to uh you know once these companies ipo and they're listed to be listed as investment grade which is above triple b which means uh pensions and life insurance funds and safe things can buy them now normally this process takes a lot longer but spacex was able to get through really quickly with this and they're trying to do it for these guys a company like meta or google took years after being listed to be on these lists because it is just you're not investment grade if you have like the one below it is called speculative grade or junk but the idea is like you're still not making money yet there's still a risk to to loaning you money which is basically what buying their bonds is and uh there's a lot of pressure on this because if it goes through they're they're these guys borrow money all the time they're borrowing money like crazy if they start borrowing money not just from vcs but from life insurance funds then it publicizes their problem you know what i'm saying it puts it on the public it puts it on the general public things that are likely to get bailed out so that is those are my financial worries around this and i'm not going to go into too much detail about that but i'm not going to go into too much detail around all this whether that technology i think is like i honestly see things that impress me maybe i'm being fooled by marketing but i continually see things that impress me uh maybe not for society's all good but they're like they're doing things that were hard so i don't know i don't give any thought i'm talking for a lot i want to yeah can you remind me because wasn't there there was a big pushback on xais or space spacex's ipo yes that was their inclusion in like retirement funds like the s&p 500 like yeah track they didn't get included in that but this is like when spacex goes to borrow money the rating agencies will give their bonds a grade and uh much like mortgage bonds mortgage-backed securities and if you get above triple b it is like the unlock it's the holy grail unlock where you can get access to a lot of things that are that are legally not allowed to buy you under that and so there's a big push like they're they're they're putting a ton of pressure on rating agencies they're hiring the best lobbyists they're hiring lawyers they're trying to crack that thing and it just from the general public perspective you're like you don't want to see any of that you don't want that to happen you want it to be an honest ratings assessment of like how risky is loaning these guys a ton of money sorry this this is for their issuance of stock or the bonds they've been this is the bonds that open ai and uh anthropic and the other companies are issuing okay and they're showing a lot of them it's like they're issuing so many bonds which is them asking to borrow money i'll use that it's crowding out government debt that's the idea government debt is being crowded out which is like there's never going to be a government debt that's being crowded out which is like there's never been something at scale borrowing this much money and they probably transition that's an insane transition that's perfect i hope i land this uh well okay on that note that was awesome the holy eye segment i said final fantasy and nothing else you were looking at me with like soulful eyes i felt i was just lost i was lost i don't know if you have any thoughts i want you to speak i would honestly like to hear your thoughts even if it's like just unstructured because i it's a genuinely interesting thing to me and i'm i'm uh okay i'll i'll pose one interesting thing and then we can can move over to bonds what aiden said uh primogen who we've had on the show and is a lovely tech youtuber who has much more deep experience with programming than i do uh released a video what two days ago now and said this this is basically his feelings on these new models being released that are increasingly competent but at the same time i'm still gonna have the real problem i have which is how do you make someone's life better with the code which is really how do i make it better with the project and so it really doesn't absolve me of the hardest part of programming which is making something awesome and so when i see all these slop games that you see like there's a reason why i feel upset and it's because the actual hard part about making a game isn't putting together a demo it's making something that's repeatable and fun and when i look at that i go okay yeah that took you some money and then waiting for a prompt to finish but the actual fun part it's not there there's nothing fun about what you built and really that's a reflection of me which is that given infinite resources can i build something fun can i i thought that it was pretty interesting he i've really i mean so i've been able to chat with him a whole bunch over the years so his perspective's been evolving quite a bit as well and he's sort of in the middle camp as i would say i am i'm obviously a hundred percent ai is good but uh other than that i other than that other than that i'm very much in prime's camp of like this shit is getting better and better and really really powerful and good and you know he has shown or talked about many examples where he's seeing this stuff every software engineer i talk to now i ask like are you using ai most but importantly not all uh have said like it's just too good to not use now at the same time it's really interesting to where to see it get to a point and i've certainly experienced this as well where it kind of you now have to just actually have a good idea you have to actually create value and we've seen so much slop on the internet where somebody goes look i made tetris in one shot i made gta 5 in one shot and none of these games are fucking good nobody's made one of these that is actually compelling or interesting and there's something sort of like raw and very human about the idea of so many people who clearly thought for a long time if i had all the money and time i could make such a sick game and now those same people can this technology can make it in 30 minutes with twenty dollars in tokens and then it turns out hey your idea isn't very fucking good actually, and it's this really strange thing like for the first time you know we are opening up access to for many people to be able to create whatever they thought and it turns out hey actually ideas are really fucking cheap and easy to come by and it's going to take real deep design and creative skill to make something that anybody cares about i think it's like a fascinating dynamic that's happening okay i actually have before we get to the bond sell-off i actually have a pushback that i want to run by you guys and it's this conversation i had recently with a friend who he has worked uh he he he worked in recruiting for a long time but more recently he's been talking to a friend uh to help him build his like youtube and media business basically and that friend works in and around like roblox a lot and because of this he's been trying to get to know and understand roblox like what makes um for a popular game uh how do people build these things what's the scale of the dev team how do people monetize this stuff and he was giving me these notes on how what trends on roblox uh and the way thumbnails work and the way that like games will pick up really hard for short periods of time and then fade away and how there will be a ton you know how on youtube like if a time then it fades out he's saying roblox is really like that but with video games it's like these these little miniature games that aren't really games in the traditional way that we would look at them as like millennials or even like gen z might uh they are like these little interactive experiences that are more about like the thumbnail than the actual gameplay itself and a lot of the games aren't like fun or fulfilling experiences in the way that people our age would look at video games and i think that's a really good point because i think that's a really good point and with that in mind as someone who doesn't play roblox it's like i think my fear with a lot of this stuff and when people levy this argument against like art how how art is more about like what you make and like the merit of it and the the human experience behind it and how ai doesn't replace that part my fear is a lot of people don't care a lot of people do play the slop the slop is getting copy pasted under roblox and tens of thousands of people who just like to kids who just like to eat candy and don't really care if the game is like fun in this like holistic sense that we like to parade or i think prime is kind of like alluding to there it's like the game sucks and 10 000 people are playing it right now on roblox and the person who made it and like pumped it out is actually making a lot of money making that yeah i totally but that doesn't show the thousand other people who also made slop and it didn't pick up sure you're right like if you shoot enough slop into the slop cannon at a bunch of children they're gonna play some of them right yeah but 999 out of those people are gonna go like yeah i have this really sick idea for a roblox game and vibe code it and it's gonna suck shit because they don't actually have any deep design skills they haven't built up any real true development ability that's what he said his view of the landscape is like as he's interviewed developers and he's like tried out games and he's like is like developers who just pumping out stuff with ai literally hoping something hits for like a couple weeks so they can make their bag for like the year and then repeating that process pumping out the slop until they hope they get another like hit again which is crazy to me i had the exact same feel you talked about chinese micro dramas recently on this show yeah i uh my uh team and i did a deeper dive on this and uh i watched some i watched a bunch of real shorts uh which is the big western chinese company that is making them here in la and uh they have an astronomical number of views and they are truly truly slop like on the most fundamental level i'm not being an art critic here it's like my werewolf alpha billionaire boyfriend impregnated me nine times is the title really what's the title is wait there's like 50 different ones called like the billionaires like there's one where it's like i married a billionaire and i'm like i'm gonna be a billionaire and i'm gonna be a billionaire homeless ceo billionaire that's one and that's like and these are like in the top 20 do you know and they have 500 million views that's a great title and i watch that's not slop and a good chunk of them now are made with pure ai and it is slop it is slop on a fundamental level and people love it and so there's like on some level it is it is the sad reality of it is that people like it if it was like being forced on people they would be like we have to fight against this tyranny but it's it's where it's brave new world bro it's people that fucking enjoy it they they prefer it and uh you know i don't know if you mentioned this it's like people who want to eat it's like people people want to eat sour patch kids bro they want to eat them and i guess i do and you could and i and people want to eat some people will eat a lot of them yeah but you know what it feels like is like we have these fundamental weaknesses in our brain and we the technology is getting so much better at pressing that fucking button and that that other stuff is getting crowded out and uh yeah i i had a like a really kind of like i don't know i felt like dizzy i was watching these and there's just so many of them they're doing so well and uh and what's interesting is like even in the microdrama space which i think you mentioned which was normally shot with human actors crazy schedules very slop i watched a human i didn't watch a human one the script is terrible they're barely reading it's all one take you can just they make ai ones and they interviewed uh we got interviews with people that work on it and they said yeah we thought there might be some pushback but the consumer doesn't seem to care the consumer just keeps scarfing down the slop and so i don't know i i do i do wonder what percentage of people really are watching this stuff because we've said this a number of times and i don't know what i do know is that we have been talking for two weeks now about how the views on youtube just got ridiculously inflated yeah because they started changing how the the views are actually counted presumably these real shorts are doing the exact same thing yeah and then even while we hear these stories of like oh this ai song or whatever just topped spotify correct me if i'm wrong you guys have heard otherwise the vast majority of music that people are listening to is still human-made it is still human-made youtube videos it's still human-made video games and while yes it's growing and there's this increased audience that seems to be down to just like ingest slop all day long i'm probably being naive here i would like to believe that that caps out at like 20 percent of humanity and the rest of us are like hey i don't actually don't want that like yeah i'll hopefully is there an industry where it's actually taken over rather than carved out a niche maybe roblox is example i don't well i would say like if you look at where we're at in our media consumption environment and where china is at which is ahead of us on this it's it is like whether the numbers are inflated the revenue is massive and the number of people about and people that talk to me you know one of our researchers is chinese and her mom watches these all the time and so it's like it's a real thing like and it's if you look at five years ago it's zero and now it's a lot i'm just the trend line scares me whether or not it's a hit majority status yeah and you know i'm hopeful too that it hits a thing and caps out or even like smoking you know the smoking graph in america it goes big and then it it's like maybe it's a thing where we get antibodies to it people realize this fucking sucks yeah things like soda has had people realize it's kind of bad for you uh you hear about gen z doing more run clubs or getting outside and touching grass more like maybe it's a thing where humans are like oh my god i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i'm gonna die we always get one shot by something new and then we figure it out i'm hopeful i think it's possible i might have copium but i i think look before all this ai stuff jimmy fallon was popular okay and if you were to imagine like slop people have always people have always liked slop and there's always gonna be a percentage of people that like slop and now there's a new version of slop that they can get in this very intense endless format and i most people don't watch jimmy fallon right most people don't i guess it's i was about to say don't play roblox and that's not true but i'm sure there's a lot of people that like slop and there's a lot of people that like slop true they have five billion users there's a lot i don't know maybe it's copium i would like to believe that the majority of people don't want to watch this stuff because yeah these numbers are huge and you're right and the numbers for people who watch human content on netflix is way way way way bigger sure and so maybe we hold the line you know come on it could happen i'm with you i don't want to give up bro i want to hold the fucking line i'm down i just want to like not bury my head i don't want to be like the guy like i don't know pretending there's nothing happening this is like this is fine yeah no no we're on the same page i just i i want to believe that there's a cap on how many people are willing to do this stuff that for example that you and you and me and every person that i know in my life is not going to suddenly go you know what i do like this now like none of the people in my life would at any point be like you know what i'm gonna watch chinese micro drama slop like they're not gonna do that and so i i want to believe that the majority of humans even if it's just 51 over 49 like that's enough i think we can hold the bulwark yeah you know what and with the important caveat that all ai is good and that's the lemonade stand stamp of approval on slop that's the promise well why don't we we mosey on over to this global bond sell-off okay that has been going on and you said two trillion dollars the expected market cap of anthropics ipo yeah i thought that was an interesting number because two trillion dollars is the amount that countries are going to be spending on and that's the expected market cap countries are expected to spend on debt servicing this year As in paying interest on government debt across all nations. And the story here is bonds across pretty much every OECD country right now, the bond yields on that are climbing right now. So like US, like 10-year, 30-year bonds, French bonds, German bonds, it's all increasing at the moment. The yield for US treasury bonds specifically is climbing well, I think quite a bit above 5%. And I was going over this and I was trying to dig into my mind. And I was like, you know, I went to school for this. I learned about this stuff. I learned all the terms. Yeah, you have no excuse. I'm going to do a little refresher. And I wanted to just walk it back and kind of explain to people how these things work. So. You might be familiar with treasury bills. These are like the shorter term bonds that have been issued. Those are like a year or less. Dude, you've got to turn off notifications on Discord, man. What if somebody sends my address to you right now? What if I send my address to you? Oh, who would do that on a podcast? Who would share someone's address? I mean, it's. Who would do that? So I feel like a lot of people are familiar with treasury bills, which are have a year or less of a term. The way these work is say I buy a 5% treasury bill for $1,000. And then I get my $1,000 back with a 5% return on it. And a lot of people were doing that a couple of years ago because the time. I did it. The interest rates on like six month bills were at historic highs. So even like normal people were just putting their small amount of savings into treasury bills because it was like, oh, this is a free 5% over six months. But for treasury bonds that are longer term, like say a 10 year or a 30 year bond, the way they work is you don't like you're not buying the bond and then just getting that interest back at the end. You're getting coupon payments. And with US bonds, you get semi-annual coupon payments. So say you buy that $1,000 bond for 30 years. What you get is twice a year, you'd get a $25 payment if that bond was at 5%. And you could use this coupon like at Walmart. And you could, it's $25 in Walmart credit. That's actually how the US ones work. It's all in Walmart credit. Walmart and Raytheon. Walmart and Raytheon store credit. You would pick the option when you buy the bond. Goes to two great American companies. And if Anthropic gets their way with regulators, there'll be a third Anthropic bond. Hell yeah. That's the news. That'll be the big three. But so you get that over the entire lifetime of the bond if you own it, right? You get 25% or sorry, $25 every six months for the full period. Period of the bond. But if you own that bond, you can also sell it. And there is another value. That's not the interest that gets talked about all the time, which is the yield or the yield to maturity, which is a calculation of the coupon payments, the face value of the bond and how much more time it has left until it matures. So right now, because a bunch of people are selling bonds all at the same time, what does that mean? It means the face value of what that bond is going to sell for is being driven down. So say I gave that example of the $1,000 bond I bought earlier. Maybe now because a bunch of people are trying to sell at the same time, I'm actually going to sell mine for like $900 or $800. And as a result, whoever is buying that bond has a perceived higher yield than just that 5%, right? Because they're getting at the end term of the bond, they still get $1,000 paid back to them because it's a $1,000 bond. That's what it was initially bought for. So so many people are doing this all at once right now that it's pushing yields higher and higher. And also, in order to compete with the amount of people that are putting or selling these bonds in the market, governments, in order to continue selling bonds of their own, have to raise interest rates on existing new bonds that are being put out in order to remain competitive with these higher yields. And this is pushing yields in the broader bond market higher and higher and higher. And one of the main reasons this is happening right now is not only are governments competing for this, like governments are usually the largest issuers of bonds, but large AI companies for the first time in kind of history, from my understanding, are issuing huge amounts of competitive bonds of their own. And part of that is because a lot of these AI companies are hitting a wall where they can't do anything about it. They can no longer, like companies like Google are, you know, they're having a time period where they're facing a negative cash flow on a quarter for the first time, first time in history, right? Or a negative, posting a net loss for a quarter for the first time in history. So as the expectations of AI get higher and higher, and these companies are under more and more financial pressure, they're issuing these bonds in order to get more cash to continue pushing this AI race forward. And it's having this insane effect on the larger bond market where all of these things are going up at the same time. And the consequences for governments are at a time when the global debt is at like 300 trillion or something. And the debt servicing costs of the debt now is at this like $2 trillion high. All of these governments are issuing bonds at the highest percent of interest that they've ever, that, that they have had to list at in a while. And they will have to continue to pay on that interest way down the line. So debt servicing costs as a part of their budget become a higher and higher portion of their budget, putting like more strain on them financially. And it's weird to see this like massive financial effect, like be fueled by the issuance of like private bonds. Like things are so rarely issued at this scale that it could have this effect on the global bond market. Yeah, only I would say is, I don't know. I think that's, that's, it's part of it. I mean, there's a couple other things too. Like I, real quick, do you want me to understand? So presumably the reason the bond prices are being pushed down, many people, like you said, are selling. Yeah. What is the incentive to sell right now for $800 or $900? If you know, you can just wait it out and get that back. Is it just, you need a bunch of short-term cash? Yeah, I don't think, I don't think I really know the answer to that, to be honest. Maybe they don't. But why people want, I know there's a general sentiment that like the, because of like the Iran war and like economic instability or inflation, people want access to cash or don't perceive U.S. Treasury bonds as safe as they used to. So they want to move their money to other things. But I feel like there's a larger story that I don't understand. I think that's the main reason. It's like this, this gigantic spike in yields is partially because they have to compete with this massive issuance by AI companies. But partially it's like everyone waking up. And it kind of started when Scott Besant stepped in and tried to buy some bonds ourself with printed money. And like people started looking at it and they're looking at it all over. And they're just realizing that almost every one of these major developed economies has no real plan to ever, not just like balance the budget, but to ever do it. They have no real way to pay back what they borrowed. And their plans for the future are all to like, borrow even more, like to borrow even, like to accelerate. And so if you're loaning a human being money and they, you notice that they are, they show up with a new Ferrari and then a new Bugatti. And then they're like, it's, it's just obviously like, oh, you are never going to pay me back. Or like, if you're going to pay me back, it's going to be not in the way that I intended. And so the risk is higher. Are they, are the bonds like not working or something? Presumably the, you're still going to be paid back. Or are you, are you saying that people are now worried that these governments are going to default and not pay them? So it's accounting for the risk of default. It's the same reason why like Ukrainian war bonds have like such a high percentage of interest, right? If they need to accommodate for the risk of that, not being paid at some point in the future or the coupon payments failing. And there's just broad decreased trust across all governments now, basically. But a company, we've done this in the show a couple of times, a country like the US or Japan or the UK or the Eurozone, really, they can't actually default because they can always print new money. And so they can't actually default because they can always print new money. So the real risk is that I'm going to get that $1,000 back, but you're going to print so much money. It won't be worth anything. So I want to get my money now. I got my $100 in real money now and I buy something with it that's valuable. So maybe you understand this part a little better than I do. Warsh, Kevin Warsh is, I think I brought this up a while ago, is like he has this outlook of not guiding the markets, so to speak. So the previous Fed chair, like Powell and the previous Fed chairs for like quite a while, since the 2008 crisis, had this general idea of let's hint at what we're about to do in order to give the market like a sense of security so that they have, feel more confident of like where to put their money. But Warsh doesn't really want to do that. Yeah, I guess I would say Warsh is interesting. He has talked a big game. He has seemed tough. And yes, he did get rid of forward guidance. So they no longer like, I think that might've been a good idea because Powell was like basically telling everybody what he was going to do. What he was going to do well before the meeting. And then the meeting would just be like an exercise. And if they did anything off script, The markets would fucking panic, and I think it's better to be, but he's just talking a lot, and so far he hasn't done anything. And Trump does not want him to raise rates, which is what he needs to do to kind of fight this problem. And he says, I could do it, I could fight it, I could raise rates, but he hasn't done it yet. So it's kind of a TBD until the next meeting and see what happens, which is coming up end of this month. I will say, there's one country that kind of shows that this is not all inevitable. This is not like the fucking Ray Dalio cycle we all have to fucking go through, and it's Switzerland. Switzerland, in Europe, doesn't have a gold standard or anything, just has a debt break. They don't spend more than they, or like more than a few percent more than they make in taxes. And if you look at, I wish I had a graph, because maybe you can find it. Every fucking country in Europe, America, Japan, the yields are rising, the borrowing costs going up. Switzerland, flat and low. They can borrow as much as they want, everyone trusts them, they're a reliable partner. And their society, broadly, is doing pretty well. They have high education, they have healthcare. Like, it's not. Thank God they exist, because it's an example to show that it's not impossible. I mean, Switzerland, obviously, easier. Smaller, fucking everything, whatever. But, like, this is not inevitability. This is like politicians spending like fucking crazy, because they know they'll be out of power by the time the bill comes due. And you need to make a rule that limits that. It doesn't have to be a gold standard. You need to have something. You need to have something that stops this from happening. Otherwise, everyone will obviously ice cream for everybody while I'm here, and then. Kick the can. Kick the can. I mean, that's what the debt ceiling is in theory, right? In theory, but we've never not extended it. And, yeah, you need to make it a harder rule. The other one is China, which you mentioned. I think China's a little bit of a. I mean, there's an asterisk on it, right? There's an asterisk on it. Because they kind of hide how their debt works. Yeah, China's bond yields, nobody buys it. Like, China, when they borrow money, they borrow it from their own citizens and banks. Like, nobody goes and buys Chinese bonds, so their yield is very low. Wait, Kate, you can't buy. You can buy Chinese bonds as a foreigner, right? You can buy them, but people don't do them. Okay. And so if it was actually on the free market, like, to the globe, and it wasn't being dragged down by them buying them themselves, I think it would be a higher yield. I don't know what it would be. It would probably be lower than America, because they're more reliable on paying their debt, I'm sure. But, anyway, yeah, I don't know if you showed the graph, but highest since 1996 in Japan, highest since 2008 in the UK. Borrowing costs are a big problem, and it's going to crowd out government budgets until people figure out how to either take the pain or kick the can. And again, that's the option. That's what people are dealing with. Could Biden do some sort of loan forgiveness plan? I really hope that Joe Biden would step up and do that, yeah. And I think it's a. I want to blame him for all of this. And we do. That's the lemonade stand. Isn't that crazy? Switzerland, like, completely out of step with everyone else. Their currency is doing really well, too. Yeah, it's almost doing too well. There's no labels on. Oh, never mind, Switzerland. Okay, sorry. I needed my. China bond market. China bond yields super low. I was going to do a different story, but let's swap over to a real quick China. What if we hop on over to China? Look at China. All right. From China. Two weeks ago, I think, talked about the amazing new development in melanoma, the RNA vaccine that Moderna came out with, which is genuinely very, very exciting and cool. Okay, CAR T-cell therapy is a different type of thing, but it's also a very expensive personalized type of medicine. Without getting too much into the details, you are. extracting a person's immune system cells. You are re-engineering them to go for a certain type of cancer marker. You put them back in the human body and then they go and attack the cancer. And this works for specific types of cancers, blood cancers. This is very expensive. It is like a personalized type of therapy. And it costs, let's say, $600,000 to $800,000 in most Western economies. So this Wall Street Journal article talked about how a 25-year-old man in New Zealand was diagnosed with lymphoma, one of these cancers, chemo and radiation did not work. He learned about this CAR T-cell therapy and he was given the advice to go do it in China instead, because they will do it for only $300,000, about half of the price or less in many cases. And he went to Shanghai and he did this treatment, this extremely advanced personalized medical treatment where you're there for a while. And this August, last month, his cancer is now in complete remission. Saira Ahmed from the Anderson Cancer Center said China has basically done to CAR. CAR T-cell therapy, the same thing that it's done to other industries, which is they've industrialized it. She, she is in Texas, like a doctor who works with people in Texas for this. She says she now tells her patients to seek treatment in China because it could be $200,000 compared to $700,000 in the United States. And so I want to ask one more time. Can China let us have one fucking thing? Can we charge somebody $800,000 to fix their cancer? Come on, give us this one. They're taking games. They took short form slot from us. Now they're taking medicine. This is unbelievable. I can't believe they make electric cars cheaper. They make the cancer treatments cheaper. I'm starting to not like them. This is honestly, that's it. There's other people. Look, obviously, this is incredible that China is doing this. This is it's going to save lives and it offers competitive pressure. This is so expensive and hard to do. This particular hospital in Shanghai has done like 35 international treatments. But the fact that people around the world are recommended go to China to do this extremely. This isn't like, I don't know, the hair replacement you did. Like, this is a high tech. I think I did a bad job. I did in America. That's true. You pay a lot of money for yours. Wasn't even good services. Yeah. I mean, so it's interesting in a number of factors. Number one is just China's fucking caught up and they're like ahead of us. It's not just that they're doing it cheaper. It's not like it's like by the skinnier pants. One. A quote from this guy in New Zealand who had really looked into CAR T cell therapy was after talking with the doctors in China who we talked to after the American, Australian and Indian doctor said, I felt like I had done more research and knew more about it than the doctors I was talking to. But when I talked to the Chinese doctors, she had so much experience. It was nice to talk to someone who knew exactly what she was doing. They are straight up better than us and are half the price, and they are now advancing in CAR T cell therapy. This is a sort of specialized type of treatment that's pretty hard to work on other cancers. This has been around for like a decade, but the fact that China is like this much farther and this much cheaper and now offering it as a service is crazy, so it's cool stuff. But wow, just another industry that they are doing successfully and taking it. Yeah, I mean, it's like the continuous dismantling of this, like old view of, well, China does the manufacturing or trying to does the thing in the lower quality way, but they get it done and they get it done. Cheaply, but it's winning on both ends all the time. Now, I feel like that is what you see outside of manufacturing. This is not manufacturing, right? This is something else entirely. Yeah, I think we talked about it, but it's just the idea. If you outsource the cheap stuff, that's practice. That's how you get good at things. That's how you innovate. You know what I'm saying? The idea that you can just only keep the very top in high margin stuff, and then you lose how to make the battery and the wires and the fucking cancer treatment. And that comes from the bazillion reps that come from the start making our Roblox games. I will cry. That's our job. I'm sure they might. It's actually mostly international developers is my understanding. It's all over, but I'm sure there's Chinese. You know what this reminds me of? When we went to Shanghai and we talked to that, not professor, but a person who works in the administrative side of education in Shanghai, and he talked to us about how for a decade or two, China realized that you can get kind of highly rated if you just have a lot of scientific journal articles posted. And so they kind of just blasted all these articles out sort of as slop and we're copying other people and just got themselves up onto the board because it's like, well, China is doing a lot of science research. They're posting a lot of articles. They're doing all these different things, but he was like, the quality was not good. Chinese scientists were largely just sort of copying things, and then they hit the ceiling of what that gets you. And so the last decade. They've been like, well, I guess we just have to get really good at science and start actually making breakthroughs and doing original research. And now they are, and they are tied with the best scientists around the world. So it's interesting seeing this where this is another example of just like, yeah, for a while there's this perception of they're just kind of copying and doing it cheaply. But at some point they're just actually going to level up and now beat the rest of us. Okay, well, that segues pretty well, but in a sad way to this headline, if you bring it up. Okay, so there is a every four year major study called the Program for International Student Assessment, PISA. It is by far the most comprehensive. It has like 800,000 students across many countries. It is the most comprehensive rating of student academic achievement in reading, science and math. Those are the three. And we've talked about this before. They get an early episode about how the scores were kind of trending down in 22 or whatever. But this is the latest up. It's the 26 version. It's bad. It is bad on a. Grand zoomed out scale. Maybe you can find the chart. We are looking at dips in especially reading, but also science and math that have not been seen. They just haven't been seen. Like, mostly it's been trending up or flat for the longest time. And now we are seeing a true regression in these scores across the globe. I mean, across everyone, but especially we're seeing it here in America and a lot of these Western countries with rising bond yields. I don't know if we're going to hold the bulwark. So that's what I was thinking about when you're talking and I'm just like, we're getting worried about this next year and i know you guys discussed this on the yard weirdly talked about not the specific of the scores but we weirdly talked about this on the yard and you mentioned and we were just talking before the show you talked about how there's these four different stances you you're you're your crew on the yard kind of covered the four responses that i see which is kind of funny you said that slime said it's kind of how things have always been people are not any dumber right basically yeah you can break it down if you want yeah i would say slime was in the camp of like i don't think things are like that different now than any other time in the sense that people fall into like general pockets of like success and non-success like people will be all right uh nick and ludwig were on the same page in that even though people are failing at these traditional metrics that we're laying out for them kids are undoubtedly spending their time and getting good at other things that we don't perceive as valid as valuable or as measurable you are you know because they still exist and they still are interested in things and then i was making the argument that i do think there is like a cognitive decline that is happening right now yeah and people and at a base level like not just at a test score level like we are like a younger generation that is cognitively less capable than they used to be so i i think the data would agree with you and that's why i want to push i want to tell you this i want to open this by saying i'm going to talk to you about the ancient scrolls times and find people saying how kids these days the scrolls make them too stupid i i it is a human condition forever of them saying this new thing is making young people stupid but this score drop is so dramatic and we're looking at um reading down 28 points across all oecd countries since 2015 that is when you when you measure that out that's like a year and a half of lost learning so that's just gone based on the same age they're a year and a half behind where they were before uh and i think that's a good thing because i think that's math down 22 that's a year of lost learning one in five 15 year olds would now be considered on the old scale a low performer this is these are numbers that are much worse um and and what's interesting about in the united states the our scores we actually moved up in the rankings while moving down in the numbers because other countries dropped faster that's a dub that's a dub around us so we moved up in the rankings even though our scores are down um but the united states had the largest gap between the top 10 performers and the bottom 10 performers of any country recorded so they're like it clearly is different educational outcomes they're showing that like wealthier kids or people in better uh areas of the country are reading more uh cognitively able to answer these questions better and people that aren't are getting destroyed they're literally getting wiped out and their ability to read and so to to make it seem like this is business as usual people have always been some people are dumb but like it it does not seem to track with what we're seeing this is anomalous um and the people that are looking at this are broadly pointing at a couple of things no one can pinpoint the exact reason part of it could be covid which is where that begins to really trend down covid was bad for learning across the globe but most people expected this would bounce back by about 2025 we're in 26 not only is it not bouncing back it's accelerating to the downside so it is a crisis like it's a big deal kids are spending 6.5 hours a day on average across all of these kids on their phones on screens on screens half of all students now use ai chatbots for schoolwork that's who admits it half of all students use it and the ones that use it to write essays they score a full year behind their peers so we've talked about ai's possible potential as a learning tool currently when people use it provably they get dumber on the score it takes away any of the cognitive friction that requires you to learn something and they fall well behind and that is happening most effectively in reading but it's also hitting other things um so and there's also a global teacher there's a lot of things like there's a lot of people people things point to but those are the things people are saying are cross nation that are causing almost everyone to decline now there's a few outliers and i think it's worth talking about number one singapore by far the best performing country in this thing consistently and it stuck to it with this year they they dominated across all three subjects significantly above every other country in reading and science um they have a system that had inter um it's incentivizes intense teacher training heavy emphasis on problem solving and less memorization um they also ban phones which is a big part of it so uh it's worth noting that stands out china also had an incredible score worth talking with the china i mean crushing episode but as with all things china there there's a little bit of a twist which is that they only uh submit the test scores from their four wealthiest uh districts which is uh i'm sorry for both of these areas which is beijing shanghai zhangsu and uh zha jeng i don't know how to say the last one but uh that's like if we only use massachusetts california and new hampshire like whatever it's like our top 10 actually america does score in line with the strongest east asian countries like singapore and japan and korea and china so our best people are as smart as their dumbest no no our best people are well i guess in line with the average of are tied with their average yeah singapore's average i guess but yeah i mean it's very high scores i wouldn't say in a bad way i would say like our best schools are doing well but they are so rare comparatively in the grand scheme of the country that our national average is is brought down uh japan was top 10 across all three subjects did very well south korea taiwan i mean all these eastern countries are doing quite well estonia big estonia guy here uh was the european champion best performing european education uh they only have 1.3 million people so it's a little bit easier how many kids took the test like five kids they even have yeah you're right it's eight thousand globally so they send their like three crack estonian students yeah yeah what did they have actually yeah that's wait it was more than eight thousand it was eight hundred thousand right eight hundred thousand oh sorry sorry i'm absurd okay okay probably still like three probably still like three estonians it's like six this is a massive tag like this is a truly one of the biggest uh and well-structured analysis you can get on educational performance estonia best performing in europe and best performing worldwide in equity estonia best performing in europe and best performing worldwide in equity meaning the difference between the the richest best performing students and the worst performing students was closest so they had like an overall high performance they you know they're not as high as singapore or whatever but but pretty good on that uh one thing that's unique about their school is they do have some tech use in it but it is it is call it structured i guess the idea is that you don't get unstructured access to ai chatbots and whatever it's like there's a few things they planned around and then the only one that i think is worth like highlighting as a standout again they didn't actually go up but they stayed the same since like five ten years ago the uk and the uk which was considered kind of a low ranking one has not lost anything in like the post-covid they've maintained and so they've actually moved up the ranking quite a bit they're top 10 which is like pretty well and they're the ones most similar to all the other countries that are failing so uk is like the outlier i don't have a deep dive as to why but i would say um they did educational reforms for 2015 including a focus on traditional phonics based reading which people have abandoned in some countries which is too much detriment and uh and again phone bands phone bands and and uh phone limitations so these are not unsolvable problems and that's why i don't like the idea of like hey people have always been a little stupid or some people are whatever it's i think these are like choices we've made to give access to things that are hurting education which is like phones and ai chatbots and countries have solved them i've made problems with them and i've made problems with them and i've made problems with them and i've made problems with them and i've made problems with them and i've made problems with them and if we do it right we'll have a more literate society which i think is better in a democracy i think as people become angrier and dumber we see the result it's a problematic so i think this peter score is like a big blinking warning line warning light that that shit is not on the correct direction on this um well i guess i can give a quick counter true so or not counter but but we are seeing momentum and we've talked about on the show a bunch of people starting to ban social media for kids under the age of 18 and varying capacities in various parts of the world over in new york this is from the ap this past year mom donnie is cracking down on children to access to ai in schools so new york city public schools are banning kids from using ai tools for one year this is up to the eighth grade so mom donnie just did this announcement where like you are not going to be able to use chatbots at all in school if you're under uh you're not going to be able to use chatbots at all in school if you're under uh if you're eighth grade or less it's a little bit confusing i spent a bunch of time trying to um understand it and they even the united federation of teachers said quote this leaves many questions unanswered the general vibe seems to be already phones have been banned actually for a year or two now in new york city so no cell phones at all but then on top of that they're now saying you can't use you know ai chatbots or ai generation tools of any kind in the school system the teachers can use it to prep but they cannot use ai learning platforms or programs inside of the actual classroom because this is often talked about with ai of like oh it's going to be this amazing learning tool and i think the idea here is like we don't really know how to use this stuff and what's going to be good or bad yet and so this is a full-on like memorial memorandium for the next one year and in by the way there's other examples uh los angeles is doing the same thing but in different capacity they're temporarily blocking ai access to all grades i think this is good but what you're seeing from the sample example is that if you don't change the way that we structure our curriculum which rewards performance on homework and tests through things like people will still cheat like telling them you can't do it yeah it's not enough like you have to make a problem solving based curriculum where it's not really about what the chat like it has to be things that you are coming to solution yourself it's about creating mental friction if you don't create mental friction people become smooth wally people like it's the only way and so i do think this is progress and i think banning phones is huge but uh i just i just want to like push back on the ignoring it i i think it's i think this is real i think in 2026 these stats are real this is really happening it's a problem and it's fixable if we like treat it as a real crisis mom donnie said quote i want to kill the children yes and it then use the ability to read and we applaud him for it and we applaud him for it um yeah i mean i think that's our episode for this week this one kind of flew by yeah we have like a ton more stuff more stories we have so much more on the sheet that we were going to all caps they're putting weapons on cockroaches that's from brandon oh put that in the patreon if you guys want to hear these seven more stories and anything else you can uh join us for an extra bonus hour of content on the lemonade stand patreon every week patreon.com slash lemonade i will end it with just a little bit of optimism here which is that looking at those results of the pieces uh piece of test yeah sweden beats us in mathematics but america wins in science and reading that's right let's go baby can't wait for aiden to become a can't be right where's italy on the pizza test gonna go over there start denying science i'm gonna go home and tell my girlfriend we're moving to singapore instead actually it's gonna pivot the whole plane it's never too late by the way you can go to a singapore elementary school and finally learn to read dude we should just ship dude what the fuck estonia is way up on this list we're going to singapore we're going to singapore this year in december so maybe we're gonna feel for we're gonna steal why why this is uh you know things are so good there lemonade stand's gonna sneak into an elementary school in singapore yeah if you're an american who can't read join us on this trip we're gonna get you educated it's gonna we're gonna we're gonna get on the battle bus we're gonna head out over there we're gonna play free roblox games we're gonna doom scroll chinese ai slop and then we're gonna go to the cs major final actually you know what instead of like trying to learn from them why don't we bring them down to our level yeah let's bring slop let's bring roblox games to singapore a little espionage strategically deploy american culture try and bring them down me at a singaporean elementary school passing out vapes this is benos all right we'll see you guys next week